NOTE: THIS DOESN’T WORK. Windows changes the ID number of the OS’s based on the default. So you’d have to do something more clever than this. The default OS seems to take over ID 1.
I have a dual boot setup—for all the wrong reasons. Regardless, it becomes annoying to have to reboot into the other OS by waiting for the menu to show up, because my computer has SCSI controllers which makes boot-up times extremely long.
With a quick web search I was able to put together simple batch files to switch the default OS and then restart the system (only works if you’re letting Windows handle the bootloading, of course). Create a new batch file (I put them on my desktop) and add the following lines:
bootcfg /default /id 1
shutdown /r /t 1
The first thing you need to do is open a command prompt and type in “bootcfg”. This will list your OS’s and their ID’s. As may be already obvious, choose the ID of the one you want to be default, and change the batch file accordingly.
The other line restarts your computer (/r) and sets the warning time to 1 second (/t). You may as well not have any warning, because you can’t stop it once it starts—although one trick may be to quickly open, say, a notepad file, make some changes to it, and don’t save. When the computer tries to reboot, you’ll get the warning that you need to save or lose changes—click cancel, and it may stop the reboot. It did for me, anyway.
Once you have this set up, you may want to reduce the amount of time you get to choose an OS in the boot menu. You can do this with bootcfg (try bootcfg /? at a command prompt).
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